Marshall "Eddie" Conway

After an appellate court ruled that his jury had been given improper instructions, state prosecutors agreed to change his life sentence to time served and probation, and Conway was released from prison on March 4, 2014 after having served 43 years and 11 months.

In February 2001, the Baltimore City Council passed a resolution urging the Governor of Maryland to pardon Conway, over the strident protests of police officers. Conway has written a book on his life, Marshall Law: The Life & Times of a Baltimore Black Panther, that was released on April 4, 2011.

Black Panther Party member Jack Ivory Johnson was released from Prison in May 2010.

Conway appealed to the court to be represented by either Charles Garry or William Kunstler, two attorneys who consistently represented party members. Both lawyers had offered their services free of charge. However, the court denied Conway's request and appointed a lawyer who performed no pre-trial investigation and never met with Conway. Therefore, Conway chose to absent himself from much of his January 1971 trial.

On the night of April 21, 1970, Baltimore Police Officers Donald Sager and Stanley Sierakowski were shot by three assailants who fired at least eight rounds at the officers during their response to a domestic disturbance call. Officer Sager was killed and Officer Sierakowski was critically wounded. About an hour later, Officers James Welsh and Roger Nolan arrested two men near the scene of the shooting, based on information they received over police radio. The men were Jackie Powell and Jack Ivory Johnson, and two pistols were found near the location where they were hiding. The police determined that these two men, Powell and Ivory Johnson, knew members of the Baltimore Black Panther Party chapter or were affiliated with it.

There are several controversies involving the trial and conviction of Conway. The trial took place just two years after the Baltimore riot of 1968, the use of the photo line-up was questioned and the reliability of the jailhouse informant was brought up. In addition, Conway fired two lawyers, the first (Nelson Kandel) over trial strategy differences and the second one that was appointed to represent him and who Conway refused to cooperate with. Conway requested that his cellmate, attorney Arthur Turco, be appointed to represent him. Turco requested bail to be able to do so, but both of these requests were denied. Conway claims to have been a political prisoner.

Immediately after contact with the two men, Officer Nolan briefly chased a black man on foot and tried to make contact with him. The man then fired several shots at Nolan and escaped. Nolan stated that he had previously seen this man on his assigned beat and could recognize him, but he did not know his name. Based on the affiliation of the two suspects with the Black Panther Party, Nolan was shown two photo line-ups of party members. In the first line-up, Nolan claimed that a picture of Conway, taken seven years earlier in 1963, resembled the shooter. In the second line-up, which used a current photograph of Conway, Nolan positively identified Conway as the individual who had shot at him. Welsh also positively identified Conway as the man whom Nolan had chased.

Marshall "Eddie" Conway (born April 23, 1946) is a former leading member of the Baltimore chapter of the Black Panther Party who in 1971 was convicted of murder of a police officer a year earlier, in a trial with many irregularities. In 2014 he was released on parole, after an appellate court ruled that his jury had been given improper instructions.